Project: Automated offsite backups for an NSLU2 – part 13

I’m setting up automated offsite backups from my NSLU2 to Amazon S3. With suprisingly little effort, I’ve managed to get a tool called s3sync running on the “slug” (as it’s known). s3sync is a Ruby script, so in order to run it, I had to install Ruby, which in turn meant that I had to replace the slug’s firmware with a different version of Linux, called Unslung. Once all of this was done, I just had to set up the appropriate directory structures and certificates so that the sync tool could use SSL, and write a simple upload/download script. All of this worked pretty much as advertised in the tools’ respective documentation – for the details, see the previous posts in this series.

My final step had been to set up a cron job to run the upload script, but it had failed, not logging anything. In order to debug, I ran the upload script directly from the command line, and left it to run overnight, copying a large set of directories to S3.

13 hours later, it had completed. From the jet3St Cockpit, I checked how much data was present in the bucket; it told me I had 1.61Gb, split over 2774 items. This seemed a little on the low side, but I had to get back to my workstation to be sure. And there, the same program told me that I had 1.71Gb, split over 2770 items. Checking the console showed that the command had, it thought, succeeded with no errors – but and the directory that was meant to be synced claimed to be about 4Gb in size!

A quick investigation showed that there were certainly files missing from S3. I decided to see what would happen if I ran it again – would it start uploading where it left off?

I suspect sorting this problem out may take a certain amount of poking around over a number of days, so I won’t post again in this series until I’ve found the solution.

[Update] Still hard at work on this; it looks like there’s a problem with s3sync making it cut out after some amount of transfer, so I’m trying to diagnose the problem – which is tricky when each exeperiment takes 24 hours :-/ Final results will be posted here when I have them.